Open participation through a fast Internet

Menu

Category Archives: Music

But the reality is that nowadays, one can choose between a game costing £40 that will last weeks, or a £10 CD with two great tracks and eight dud ones. I think a lot of people are choosing the game – and downloading the two tracks. That’s real discretion in spending. It’s hurting the music industry, sure. But let’s not cloud the argument with false claims about downloads.

Or keep making such claims and keep electing Pirate Party members the the EU Parliament.
Either way such claims have a limited life span.

Avril Lavigne fans push their girl's video to #1 on YouTube by
pretending to cheat:

On June 19th, the Avril Lavigne fansite Avril Bandaids launched a
“Girlfriend” YouTube Viewer (It’s now been retired) with the
intention of making “Girlfriend” the #1 YouTube video of all time. The
url that hosted the viewer reloaded the video every 15 seconds. The theory
was that Avril fans could load up that url, let it run, and Avril would
get the top video spot in no time.

Well, Entertainment Tonight, Perez Hilton, Wired.com, The Globe and
Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, and many others picked up the story
and started crying “foul.” How dare this hardcore group choose the
number one YouTube video for us!? How dare they! And that’s where this
story gets good.

There was no foul. YouTube caps it’s views per specific IP at 200 per
day. (That may sound like a lot, but it’s not enough for a small legion
of hardcore fans to make a dent in a number approacing 100,000,000.) There
was no way they could game YouTube in the way they were purporting;
and they knew it all along.

So they leveraged their leverage by provoking media outrage,
causing millions of people to watch the video to see what it's about,
and now causing a third wave of blog posts, thus producing
still more views.

Now that's clever.

Not the sort of thing you'll ever see come out of telcos or cablecos, either.

ISP meddling with net neutrality could unite indy musicians and record labels
against the duopoly:

For the music business, the failure of net neutrality presents several
big problems. Musicians are at the vanguard of digital distribution
of music files, video files, and other space-gobbling content. Traffic
throttling will almost certainly result in placing severe limitations on
the amount and kind of content musicians can put out there — and it’s
pretty likely that musicians will then be forced into partnering with
businesses that have fewer limits and greater access, no doubt for a fee,
to get their gear online. Another issue is that, as covered recently
in this column, we are seeing a whole new universe of music-related
business models, and we need to see some predictability in terms of
licensing methods and how artists and copyright owners get paid. One
of the most compelling proposals is that P2P music sharing should be
rendered commercially viable and copyright-legal by the imposition of
a blanket license that would be paid at the gate (i,e., through the
ISPs). Institutionalized throttling would take this plan out at the knees.

Another problem is that record labels, distributors and retail chains
who are already in desperate jeopardy can’t compete with ISPs and
cellular providers who, having launched their own music stores, have
all the incentive in the world to steer music consumers to their own
services rather than open the pipe for folks to shop elsewhere.

This observation comes from Canada, where current attempts by some
to pass legislation similar to the U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act
(DMCA) has suddenly gotten noticed as a path to
something music lovers have seen before:

McKie is referring to proposed changes modelled on the American
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which call for a much
heavier-handed approach to interpreting what kind of content uses
are protected by copyright. At the same time a Canadian DMCA would
accord “safe harbour” status to service providers to shelter them
from a potential onslaught of copyright litigation provided they act
quickly to block infringing and illegal actions on their networks. A
Canadian DMCA could impact net neutrality by putting police power in
the hands of the networks, while providing ISPs with strong incentives
to prefer privately-negotiated content distribution deals over the
chaos of user-generated traffic. The bottom line is that musicians
have come to rely on the net as their number one go-to distribution
and marketing tool. The net got that way by being neutral to all
comers. Whether you were a platinum seller on Universal, or a couple
of unknown basement-dwellers, your video had an equal chance of going
viral. Without net neutrality, all the good pipe will get eaten up by
whoever has the power to make the deal. Which sounds a lot like the
payola days all over again.

Yep, that’s what we’ll get if we don’t have net neutrality:
payola for the duopoly.

Every song and album on Amazon MP3 is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device, including PCs, Macs™, iPods™, Zunes™, Zens™, iPhones™, RAZRs™, and BlackBerrys™; organize their music using any music management application such as iTunes™ or Windows Media Player™; and burn songs to CDs.

Here’s another view of what the telcos and cablecos have in mind for us,
or, rather, what they want in our minds:
approved content.
This is substantially different from the Internet freedom we have today
to look at whatever we want to and to publish our own content.

The Pearl Jam (and John Butler Trio and Flaming Lips and
Rage Against the Machine) AT&T censorship fiasco has reached
the attention of an FCC commissioner:

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, fire-breathing advocate of network
neutrality regulation and opponent of media consolidation, has taken
a stand on AT&T’s now infamous censorship of Pearl Jam front man
Eddie Vedder’s anti-Bush remarks at Lollapalooza. In an interview with
OpenLeft.com’s Matt Stoller, Copps supported the idea that there’s a link
between AT&T’s deletion of Vedder’s political comments from a webcast
of the concert and the network neutrality fight that’s brewing in the
halls of Congress.

“Events like this are connected to the larger issue of network neutrality,
so it is very very important,” Copps said in response to a question
about whether or not AT&T’s censorship of Vedder has any implications
for network neutrality. He went on to say, “So when something like the
episode occurs with Pearl Jam that you’re referencing that ought to
concern all of us… because if you can do it for one group, you can do
it to any group and say ‘Well, it’s not intentional,’ and things like
that. But nobody should have that power to do that and then be able to
exercise distributive control over the distribution and control over
the content too.

And it’s good that Copps sees the connection between this episode and
media consolidation.
Copps talks a good talk, but will he do more than
“grudgingly accept”
this sort of thing, like he did the bogus 700Mhz auction rules?
Will he vote against, and will he persuade other commissioners to do the same?
And can someone persuade Congress to change the FCC’s tune?
It’s all very well to rage against the machine,
but who’s going to change it?

Or can we get some Internet access competition?
Then we could have Internet freedom.

After concluding our Sunday night show at Lollapalooza, fans informed
us that portions of that performance were missing and may have been
censored by AT&T during the “Blue Room” Live Lollapalooza Webcast.

When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza
that portions of the show were in fact missing from the webcast, and
that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them.

EDUCAUSE is up in arms about a proposed
amendment
to the
Higher Education Reauthorization Act that the Senate is supposed
to be considering today.
It basically makes the Secretary of Education an arm of the MPAA
and requires institutions of higher education to police file sharing.
I think this is the most interesting part of the amendment,
where it’s saying it will:

(1) the 25 institutions of higher education participating in programs
under this title, which have received during the previous calendar year
the highest number of written notices fromm copyright owners,
or persons authorized to act on behalf of copyright holders,
alleging infringement of copyright by users of the institution’s
information technology systems, where such notices identify
with specificity the works alleged to the infringed,
or a representative list of works alleged to be infringed,
the date and time of the alleged infringing conduct together with
information sufficient to identify the infringing user, and information
sufficient to contact the copyright owner or its authorized representative; and

So universities are supposed to keep lists of allegations against
their students (or staff or faculty) and those lists can be used
to determine their funding.
Allegations, mind you, not convictions.
This is once again the entertainment industry tail wagging the dog,
in this case higher education.
Hm, I suppose that’s a bad analogy, since the entertainment industry
seems to only understand the big head, not the long tail….

And as if to demonstrate Republicans have no monopoly on horribly
bad ideas, this amendment is proposed by the Senate Majority Leader,
Democrat Harry Reid.
Is the Internet really that hard to understand?

After the IFPI
[International Federation of the Phonographic Industry]
pressured credit card companies not to process payments
to AllOfMP3.com, the company sued in a Russian court, claiming that its
credit card processing contract had been broken illegally. Now, despite
the fact that AllOfMP3 is no more, the company behind the service has
apparently won a judgment against Visa’s Russian agent.

According to
CNews, a Russian technology site, the backers of AllOfMP3
have just won their case against Rosbank, the Russian company that does
much of Visa’s processing in that country. The court ruled that Visa can
only break its contracts with merchants are when they are found guilty
of breaking the law; breaking those contracts after talking to business
groups like the IFPI was ruled illegal.

The ruling means that Visa may be forced to start processing payments
to sites like AllTunes.com and MP3sparks, the AllOfMP3 replacement site,
and Visa apparently does not plan to appeal.

Blackberry Co-CEO Jim Balsillie sees the same thing happening with the
recent launch of the iPhone.

Balsillie recently criticized Apple’s seeming willingness to commoditize
the iPhone as an Apple product, rather than bringing AT&T Wireless in
as an equal partner.

He also has issues with the iPhone being free of AT&T’s logo and with
activation having to go through Apple’s iTunes music store rather than
the AT&T Mobility site.“It’s a dangerous strategy,” says Balsillie.

“It’s a tremendous amount of control. And the more control of
the platform that goes out of the carrier, the more they shift into a
commodity pipe.”